mobileRNA: an integrative, automated tool for accurate identification of mobile RNA molecules based on multiple genome mapping.

mobileRNA, an automated multi-genome RNA-seq mapping pipeline, identifies mobile RNAs more robustly, but reveals poor overlap with existing mobile mRNA annotations in grafted plants.

• Why it matters: Existing mobile RNA methods have high technological noise and lack standardized workflows, making robust identification difficult and potentially unreliable.
• What they did: The pipeline aligns RNA-seq reads simultaneously to merged reference genomes, validated on simulated grafting combinations and benchmarked against other methods. It also introduces a genome mappability index to judge detection success.
• The result: In real grafted-plant data, mobileRNA shows poor overlap with prior mobile mRNA annotations, supporting recent doubts about their reliability. The mappability index suggests SNP-based or two-step mapping approaches are limited, while cross-species grafting with large evolutionary distances is more likely to succeed.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.